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Macromedia News FireFox Extension Preferences

Thursday, December 9, 2004

As I posted the other day, I have built an extension for FireFox that makes it easy to keep up with the latest news and information from Macromedia. Judging by the number of downloads, as well as emails I have received, it seems to be pretty popular.

I have also received a couple of emails asking for features / changes that are already possible by tweaking the preferences. So, I figured I would make a post to describes in detail what each preference does, as well as describe some undocumented settings.

First, if you have not already installed the extension, then: Install the Macromedia News FireFox Extension (requires FireFox 1.0)

Once you have installed the extension and restarted FireFox, then you are ready to go.

You can modify the preferences a number of ways:

All preferences will take affect as soon as they have been changed.

Once you open the preferences you will see the following window:

Lets go over each preference:

Trim Title : If checked, if the length of the title of an item is greater than the trimTitleLength setting (default of 35), then the title will be shortened to the trimTitleLength setting, and an ellipsis will be added. If not checked, then the entire title will be shown (FireFox may cut it off to make it fit in the menu).

This setting is useful if you don’t want the menu to take up a lot of space.

Here are some examples:

Item with Trim Title on

Item with Trim Title off

Display Source : This determines whether the name of the source that the item is from will be displayed (i.e. which weblog it is from). If checked, then the source will be added in parentheses after the title.

Item with Display Source on

Item with Display Source off

Displayed by Source

Displayed in Chronological order

In addition to the preferences available to the preferences panel, there are two additional preferences which can only be set via about:config.

While the entire extension is not supported, changing these two preferences is extra not support, mostly because I have not had a chance to test them very much. If you try the settings, let me know if you have any problems with them (or if they work as expected).

If you have any questions or need something clarified, just post it in the comments.

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